A mere 10 seconds after the engine's ignition, ISRO announced a "magnificent normal liftoff".
At precisely 11:50 am this morning, India's first solar mission, Aditya-L1, successfully lifted off from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Andhra Pradesh's Sriharikota.
As the final countdown for the launch of India's first solar mission started at ISRO's space centre, the nation held its breath and watched India enter an elite club of space powers.
A mere 10 seconds after the engine's ignition, ISRO announced a "magnificent normal liftoff" of the PSLV rocket with Aditya-L1 onboard.
ISRO scientists couldn't contain their joy and excitement as the first stage of the launch was declared successful after the rocket generated a nominal thrust and followed the right trajectory. "The roaring sound and the vibrations felt at the space centre are just amazing," an ISRO scientist exclaimed.
One hundred seconds into the launch, the first stage's performance was officially declared normal after the separation of the ground-lid strap-on. A few seconds later, the air-lit strap-on was successfully separated, and scientists watched the PSLV rocket head to space.
Around 63 minutes after the launch, the Aditya-L1 was successfully separated from PSLV and injected into an elliptical orbit around the Earth. Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) chief S Somanath declared the launch a success.
ISRO in its latest update said, that Aditya-L1 has started to generate power and its solar panels have been deployed. The first EarthBound firing to raise its orbit is scheduled for tomorrow, September 3 at 11:45 am.
Aditya-L1 will be placed in the halo orbit around Lagrange point 1 (L1) of the sun-Earth system, which is about 1.5 million km from Earth. The journey to L1 will take 125 days.
Discovered by mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange, Lagrangian points are places in space where gravitational forces, acting between two objects, balance each other in such a way that spacecraft can remain in a fixed position with minimal fuel consumption.
The L1 point is considered the most significant of the Lagrangian points for solar observations.
According to ISRO, the key objectives of the mission are understanding the coronal heating and solar wind acceleration; understanding the initiation of Coronal Mass Ejection (CME), flares and near-Earth space weather; gaining knowledge of coupling and dynamics of the solar atmosphere; and getting a deeper understanding of solar wind distribution and temperature anisotropy (non-uniformity in different directions).